If there’s a cryptocurrency out there that must have a guardian angel or an entity with really, really deep pockets to protect it, it has to be Solana ($SOL.X). If Solana was a vehicle, it’s about as reliable as a 1990’s Ford Explorer or any 3500 Dodge Ram.
Solana launched in 2020, and like the launch of 2016’s spectacular bomb No Man’s Sky (which is really freaking awesome now), it has been a huge mess. Solana has had 10 to 11 major outages that have resulted in either partial downtimes or total outages.
To make matters worse, the Ethereum-killer and ‘censorship-resilient network’ lost one of its major cloud providers: Hetzner. Hetzner hosted a good chunk of Solana’s nodes. So if they’re turned off, what kind of impact would that have? A big one.
Hetzner’s ban and subsequent shutdown of Solana’s nodes last week resulted in 40% of all nodes going offline and effectively taking down 20% of the network. From a price action perspective, either no one cared, or no one was worried.
Then, on Saturday, the Google ($GOOG) Cloud Twitter account posted this message publicly to Solana’s head honcho:
Hey @aeyakovenko 👋
Should we tell our followers the big news?
— Google Cloud (@googlecloud) November 5, 2022
Long story short, Google Cloud announced they are now, officially, a block-producing validator for Solana’s network.